Advertising in a blink

September 22, 2006

In the time it took to read this sentence, you could have heard two of the latest ads airing on Clear Channel radio stations around the country. In a bid to grab the attention of channel-surfing consumers, the massive media company has begun airing two-second "blink" ads. Rather than placing these spots in regular commercial breaks with other ads, the company sandwiches them unexpectedly between songs. If you were listening to one of 1,100 stations running the ads on Sept. 10, you would have heard your favorite song end, followed by "The Simpsons -- D'oh! -- tonight on Fox." Before you were even aware you'd been pitched, the next song would have begun. "It came and went so fast that you were aware of it if you were brand aware and you weren't annoyed by it if you weren't," said Jim Cook, senior vice president of creative services for the company's radio division. Marketing experts said these sneeze-and-you-miss-it spots are the latest strategy to thwart channel surfers. ___ SQUEEZING ADS IN Plagued by Tivo-equipped viewers, television networks have already begun running spots during programming. Recently, you've probably been watching a primetime show when you notice characters from a different program pop their head into the corner of the screen to advertise their show. Outside of television and radio, ads are printed on the side of disposable coffee cups, projected onto the sidewalk beneath your feet and stenciled onto the white lines that separate parking spaces. Clear Channel insists it's not trying to outwit listeners by sneaking the ads in. Rather, it says the spots are a unique, unobtrusive way to highlight a brand. So far the series of ads for three Fox shows this month and last have been the only examples of the blinks, but Clear Channel is working on signing other "major advertisers" and expects to run more blinks by the end of the year, Cook said. Cook wouldn't give further details on the upcoming ads, and he wouldn't say how much Fox paid for its promotion. "The power is that people don't have the opportunity to switch. The challenge is that two seconds just isn't a lot of time. It's hard enough to put a message into 30 seconds, so the idea you could do it in 2 seconds is a little far-fetched," said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. ___ WORTH THE TIME? Calkins said two-second spots would work best to remind people of an upcoming event that they were already aware of -- such as a television season premiere. "You're sure not going to do this to launch a new product or to try to reposition a brand or to inform people in any depth of something because there's just no time," he said. Cook said the ads are most effective when they're paired with longer, more traditional ads to flesh out the message. He said there are plenty of established brands with indelible "sound logos" that could take advantage of the format, citing the Intel inside jingle as an example. Calkins and University of North Carolina marketing professor John Sweeney agreed that Clear Channel should be careful not to overuse the ads or risk cluttering its programming. For its Fox promotions, the company allowed a maximum of two blinks per hour. "Fundamentally the more you pollute up and clutter up the airwaves with stuff, the less attractive that environment is going to be," Sweeney said. ___ asap reporter Jonathan Drew is based in New York.